Welcome back to Unfiltered with Love. I'm your host, Carrie Love, and I'm so glad you're here. Let's get into today's conversation. This week in class, we were given a series of reflection questions. They weren't really questions we were supposed to answer out loud, they were meant to be personal. The kind of questions you sit with, maybe journal about, or maybe let roll around in your head for a while. And honestly, I wasn't planning on talking about them today. But there was one question that hasn't left me all week. It was simply this What would happen if I stopped protecting that identity? I've asked myself a lot of questions over the years, but this one felt different because I realized I didn't even know what identity I was protecting. After class, I noticed people talking about these questions, and something that kept coming up was how difficult they were. Not because the questions were confusing, but because it was really hard to name our emotions. It's hard to be honest with ourselves, and maybe even harder to trust someone enough to let them see those parts of us. To actually say, this is what I'm afraid of. That's vulnerable. And honestly, I debated whether I even wanted to talk about this today. But then I thought, maybe I'll just put it out there. Because maybe somebody listening has never said these words out loud either. So I sat with the question, what identity am I protecting? At first I thought, maybe it's the identity of being independent. I've always been pretty independent. I've moved across the country by myself, rebuilt my life after divorce, traveled alone. I've started over more than once, I've figured things out. If you know me, you probably think, yeah, Carrie can handle herself. And I've always been proud of that. But then I asked myself something else. Am I protecting my independence or am I protecting myself from disappointment? Because those aren't the same thing. And I think I found the answer. I don't think I'm afraid of needing people. I think I'm afraid of depending on someone and finding out they won't show up. That was really hard to admit. Because I don't ever want to be seen as weak. I don't want people thinking I can't handle my own life. I don't want to depend on someone so much that if they leave, everything falls apart. Somewhere along the way, I think I started believing that being strong meant never needing anyone. But maybe that's not actually strength. Maybe it's fear wearing strength's clothes. Then something else happened this week. I had shared these reflection questions online, and a friend commented something that I thought was a really thoughtful perspective. He wrote, Perhaps the selves we created to survive should not be judged, but thanked for carrying us through difficult places. Yet survival was never meant to become our permanent identity. I read that and I just sat there because my first reaction to this whole exercise was, why am I still like this? Why haven't I gotten over this yet? But maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe instead of criticizing the parts of ourselves that learned how to survive, we thank them. Maybe that fiercely independent version of me, the woman who decided she'd never have to rely on anyone, wasn't broken. Maybe she was protecting me. Maybe she carried me through seasons where she had to. And I'm grateful for her. She got me through some really difficult places, but maybe she doesn't have to carry everything anymore. The second part of my friend's comment stayed with me too. He said, Grace invites us to loosen our grip on who we thought we had to be and trust the person God is still calling us to become. That phrase, loosen our grip. I love that. Because he didn't say we had to reject who we were, he didn't say those older versions of ourselves were wrong. He just said maybe we don't have to hold on to them so tightly anymore. Maybe we can thank them and then just let them rest. Last week on the podcast, I talked about how different my life is from what I imagined 10 years ago. If someone had shown me my life today back in 2016, I never would have believed it. And maybe this is connected, because maybe it isn't just my life that's changed. Maybe I've changed too. But am I still making decisions from an old version of myself? Am I still protecting someone who doesn't need protecting anymore? I don't know. I'm still figuring that out, and maybe that's why I wanted to share this. Not because I have the answer, but because maybe healing doesn't always look like finding the answer. Maybe healing begins when we finally are willing to ask the right question. So before I go today, here's the question I've been sitting with all week. What identity are you still protecting? And what if you thank that version of yourself for getting you this far instead of judging them? And then what if you loosened your grip just enough to become whoever you're still being called to become? Thanks for hanging out with me today. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. Send me a message, leave a review, or share this episode with someone who might need it. And before I go, what part of yourself have you been protecting? And what do you think would happen if you didn't have to anymore? Until next time, keep asking good questions, keep being curious, and most importantly, keep showing up as yourself. This is Unfiltered with Love. I'm your host, Carrie Love, and I'll see you next week.